It’s a simple question that every business should ask itself from time to time: If someone Googled your business today, would you actually be happy with what they found?
Not because you need to have a perfect online presence, or because you should be posting on every platform going, but because there’s a very good chance that someone considering working with you, buying from you, recommending you or partnering with you, will do some research before they make that decision. What they find helps them form an impression of your business before you’ve even had a conversation.
Your visibility is bigger than your social media
When we talk about being visible, it’s easy to immediately think about Instagram or LinkedIn, but your visibility is actually made up of lots of different touchpoints: Your website, social media, LinkedIn, Google reviews, media coverage, podcast appearances, interviews, events, speaking opportunities, partnerships, and even what other people are saying about you.
Someone might discover you through a recommendation from a friend, then look at your website. They might come across a LinkedIn post, find an old article about you, check your reviews or have a look at your social media. None of those things necessarily exists in isolation. Together, they start to create a picture of your business, and that picture can either help you build trust before you ever speak to someone, or give a rather outdated or incomplete impression of what you actually do.
When did you last look at your business from the outside?
One of the challenges with visibility is that we are often far too close to our own businesses. We know what we do and we know how much has changed over the past year. We know about the new service we launched, the clients we’ve worked with, the expertise we’ve developed and the projects we’re proud of, but does anyone else?
It’s surprisingly easy for a business to evolve while its communications stay exactly the same. Your website might still describe a business you were two years ago. Your LinkedIn profile might focus on services you no longer prioritise. Your social media might still be speaking to the audience you were targeting when you first started, or perhaps you’re doing some genuinely interesting work but hardly talking about it at all.
That’s why I think a visibility check is worth doing every now and then. Not as a huge audit or another job to add to an already long to-do list, but simply as a chance to step outside your business for a moment and see what someone else would see.
Start by searching for your business on Google and looking at it as though you’ve never heard of it before. Is it immediately clear what you do, who you help and why someone might choose you? Does the messaging reflect where the business is now, or are there things that have changed that you haven’t communicated? Does your social media look active and relevant? Are you appearing in the places your customers actually look for information and recommendations? And perhaps most importantly, does what people find give them a reason to trust you?
You don’t have to be everywhere
This is where I think businesses sometimes make visibility harder than it needs to be. There can be enormous pressure to create more content, post more often and be present on every possible platform, but more isn’t automatically better.
If your customers are primarily finding you through referrals, LinkedIn, industry events and Google, spending hours trying to become a TikTok sensation probably isn’t the best use of your time. If you’re a hospitality business, your reviews, visual presence, media coverage and partnerships might be particularly important. For a B2B business, your website, LinkedIn presence, thought leadership, industry media and personal reputation may carry more weight.
The point isn’t to tick every possible communications box. It’s to understand where your audience is actually looking and make sure that when they get there, they find something useful, relevant and reassuring.
Visibility is about more than being seen
Ultimately, the goal of visibility shouldn’t simply be to get more eyes on your business. It should be to make it easier for the right people to understand you: What you do, who you do it for, what makes you different and why they should consider working with you.
You could have a fantastic business and still be missing opportunities simply because people don’t know enough about you. You might be doing brilliant work that nobody hears about, have an interesting story you’ve never told or have expertise that could genuinely help people but rarely share it. You might have fantastic clients who would happily recommend you, but very little evidence of that online. Sometimes the problem isn’t that your business needs to become better, it’s that more of the right people need to see what is already there.
So, when was the last time you stopped looking at your business as the person running it, and looked at it as someone deciding whether they should trust you?
Googled yourself lately? It might be worth it… and you might be pleasantly surprised… or you might find a few things that need updating, either way, it’s useful information (especially if you are developing a marketing/communications plan).
